I wasn't generous enough when I introduced myself to @OnGBandC. I was too shy, because I assumed he must be so cool--because of his talent--that he'd be unapproachable. So I'd like to make up for it here. I found his poetry because he slipped one of his poems into a conversation.
On Twitter. I had no idea who he was, but I clicked on the link and was suddenly a world away from Twitter, from empty clichés and bromides, even from a website that looks as if it was made after 1995--and to a place where people still cared about poetry--
enough to spend time--years, even--looking for le mot juste. I stopped worrying about nuclear wars, pandemics, and the global retreat of liberal democracy. I read for hours.
"He's really good," I thought, assuming he was an important poets I should know about, but don't.
But in fact, I think, he's one of those rare raw talents in the wild, known but to a small club of initiates.
I quit everything I had planned for the day (not much, anyway) and read everything by him on the site.
"That's talent!" I thought, surprised.
I don't know why I was surprised: Of course there's lots of talent out there that I've never heard of.
But it had been a long day of reading the prose of people who don't care about prose,
who can't even hear it when a sentence is ugly; of reading English by people who don't love English; speaking to bots who only barely pass the Turing test--or people, maybe; it's so hard to tell. So when I saw the care he'd put into these poems,
which do not, believe me, spring whole from *anyone's* forehead; to write a poem that sounds like this requires labor, rewriting, trying again, often for years, and usually--given our collective indifference to poetry--doing so unrecognized.
For an afternoon, it took me from the pandemic and politics and all the things that make me think, "Humanity's not going to make it" and "How did a man write *this* sentence without physical, aesthetic pain?"
and put me in a world where words matter--and last lines, especially.
It made me hope that humanity makes it.
Afrodite/Athena
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